September 8th, 2024
An echo chamber occurs when all the inputs are equal or reinforcing to the internal belief system. Human psychology appears to have some hardwiring that impels most people to seek out and create echo chambers for themselves. It's a simple equation of seeking out what you like, and what you agree with generally accords with what you like. The echo chamber is an aspect - or perhaps the cheif mechanism - of tribal psychology. The group functions like its own cognitive organism, seeking to maintain its own harmony, which means keeping all of its constituents in general agreement. Belief grouping occurs, meaning that if someone from group A believes in belief #3 and group A also cherishes belief #4 then that same someone is almost certainly an adherent of belief #4. This is disturbing. A real life example might help: if someone is pro guns then you can guess with extremely high accuracy what their position on raising taxes will be. But the two topics aren't particularly related. Within the context of a larger group belief system they can be made to relate via an interpretation on government authoritarianism. Raising taxes and prohibiting guns smell of authoritarianism. So perhaps these two beliefs have some alignment. But if the modus operandi of such a group is limiting government control of citizen's lives, you'd expect that group to be very pro-choice. The reasoning is built into the name; you'd expect someone who wants to limit government control would want to give as much freedom of choice to the individual as possible. But this is not the case. Group belief systems (like individual belief systems) are rife with contradiction and hypocrisy.
People who are die hard adherents to their "group" often surround themselves with reinforcing inputs. They listen to people they agree with. And there's something eerily satisfying about this. It pets the fragile animal of certainty that seeks to thrive in all of us. It's the reason why people rage when they hear positions they disagree with: it threatens the comfort of that fragile animal.
It's surprisingly productive to think of emotions and belief systems as their own organisms. They fight for their own survival, and seek to thrive by spreading, by mimetically replicating themselves in the minds of others by getting you to speak.
This mimetic survival impulse is very real, so real that it can have the most dire consequences imaginable. Here's a quote from Practicing Radical Honesty: After studying suicide notes left behind and examining all the stories and interviews with friends and families, they found a theme that seemed to apply in all cases. They concluded that every suicide can be explained as 'an attempt to maintain or enhance the self.' The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live."
Suffice it to say, our ideas are so powerful they can kill us. There are far less depressing examples that are nonetheless just as tragic: sacrificing one's own life for the life of loved ones. Such an act is undertaken on the notion of what those other people mean to the person who is self-sacrificing. All this to say that we are little else other than our beliefs.
But that little else can make all the difference. What we have other than the beliefs we already have is the ability to decide what we will pay attention to, and what we pay attention to determines how our beliefs will continue to persist, or evolve or die off and be replaced by new beliefs. Echo chambers make it very hard to pay attention to anything other than what a person already believes in.
Enter the Anti-Echo Chamber.
"Years ago, I found that I listened to all sorts of people whose perspectives and beliefs I really liked and appreciated; now, I find I listen almost exclusively to people I disagree with."
If it were a joke, the speaker might reveal that they're still listening to all the same people. And for some this is the case. But let's examine the later practice a bit more.
Listening exclusively to people with whom one disagrees will cause some degree of rage in most people. But, if emotion can be well regulated, and snap reactions can be done away with, something interesting can happen. Like Michelangelo defining beauty by removing what shouldn't be there, the friction of disagreement can hone and clarify a person's beliefs. This is not likely to happen in an echo chamber. Presented with a sea of opinions a person mostly agrees with, how will they react to the opinions they don't necessarily agree with? Compared to someone who is not apart of such a belief-tribe, they will likely let those slide and not worry about being associated with something that is "pre-approved" by their tribe. Compare this to the inverse. In an anti-echo chamber where a person listens exclusively to people and positions they don't agree with - if emotional reactivity can be set aside - how will the mention of something they DO agree with strike? Likely it's a surprise. I say this because my diet of podcasts has evolved from an echo chamber to an anti-echo chamber. I now quite regularly listen to people I don't particularly like and who I think are lazy, poor thinkers. It might sound like an unpleasant experience, but natural selection rarely is. At least, natural selection is the ideal that rational thinkers would imaginably like to achieve when it comes to the robustness of their beliefs and ideas. One can easily argue that's exactly what's happening when it comes to global culture: whether it's this capitalism vs communism, or this religion vs that religion, all of them are merely belief systems that are vying for continued longevity... often at the expense of people's lives.
A cognitive trick that humans haven't yet figured out is how to be wary of ideas that are both seductive and dangerous. There are some belief systems that are old but still vigorous, meaning they are seductive and sticky and they mimetically replicate in new minds with efficient alacrity, but which also result in a lot of death and misery. Such belief systems are akin to the charming serial killer, who lures a victim into a false sense of security, of certainty, and, only when it's too late, the real danger of the situation becomes evident.
Death only really has three tools: disease, accidents, and bad ideas.
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